Send to a Friend
			Printer Friendly Format
			Leave Feedback
			Read Feedback
			Nerve RSS

Although I possess just about every signpost of someone who was molested as a child — promiscuity, bisexuality, life-of-the-party-ness, binge-drinking, an extreme weight (extremely low in my case), sadomasochism, insomnia, suicidal longing and repulsion whenever someone touches me outside of the sex act — my mother and father never exactly molested me. Few things in life are exactly something or not something.
   I have written many times about what my father semi-did, but I've never said a peep about my mom. Maybe that's because her transgression was even more inexact than was my father's. To this day I'm not sure how to place her. When I was fifteen, I went to live with my father across the country; at sixteen, I moved in with a friend's family. I didn't have particularly deep contact with my mother from then until she died when I was twenty-seven, so I know her mainly through distorted, crust-covered, childish memories. I guess I really don't know her at all.

promotion

Naked somersaults
Donna was almost two. I had just given her a bath when her mother, Krystal, came home. Donna threw off her towel and I chased after her, waving Scooby pajamas threateningly, but she just laughed and did naked celebratory somersaults. My mother came to pick me up, took a sip of the ginger ale Krystal handed her and said, "I can see why child molesters are attracted."
   Krystal's head jerked up and her mouth fell open, but my mother didn't notice. Her eyes were fixed on Donna, on whom I'd finally managed to get a Scooby top but no bottoms. My mother continued as if in a trance: "She's so innocent and puffy and . . . " — she struggled for the word — "white." A former English teacher, she deliberated over word choice. "No, it's that it's neat down there. Compact. Like a little hot-dog bun."
   Judging from Krystal's blanched face, I understood that my mother had said something freakish. But how so? My own light command over my limbs and gravity, my health, my childish joy at being alive (I was ten), had always induced in my mother the same too-intense admiration as had Donna's somersaults and giggles. I'd shake my bum on command, and my mother would chase me with her fingers out, shrieking, "Pinchee bum! Pinchee bum!" Though we were poor, she found money for lessons: I was in dance; I was a cheerleader. My mother always watched. If eyeballs had lips, she'd be licking hers. My mother became celibate at thirty for a variety of reasons — poor health, and no one

My mother did not belong in this world.

asking, mainly. So sex for her was purely theoretical, and I guess if sex is theoretical, a toddler is sexy, a ten year old is hot.
   Krystal shoved some money into my hands, ushered my mother and me out, and from then on was busy whenever I called. I loved Donna. I used to watch her for free sometimes, pretend that she was mine. But after that day, I never saw her again.

Closer
My mother did not belong in this world. She was a disappointment to her own mother, a German immigrant who was efficient, economical, accomplished. Her baby hair kinked; she did not achieve her milestones in the proper order. The only time my grandmother paid my mother any attention was when she got sick. So she got sick a lot. In school, my mother excelled in the mushy language of French, while her brother mastered the tougher German — along with sports, girls, being good-looking and getting voted student-council president.
   As a young woman, my mother was already pot-bellied, saggy-breasted, bony-kneed, eyeglassed and pockmarked. She picked her nose, scratched her head until her fingernails were lined with dandruff. Despite all this, she was coquettish, fluttering a bony hand over her mouth as she laughed and laughed at the unfunny jokes of carnies, mechanics, my grandfather, my friends. In many ways, my mother acted like a small child: she was often naked; she didn't understand peoples' motivations for what they did and in her bewilderment would make things up; she had temper tantrums that would switch swiftly to a coy, sunny mood, then back again.